But neither role precludes an inquiry into their relationship to the expansion of market agriculture. Most free farming women in the South, like elsewhere, focused their energies on sustaining the household first before engaging in market activity. For all they had in common with women in other regions, women in yeomen and small slaveholding families in the South were held in a particular system in which white men sat at the top of a pyramid of dependence. White women’s roles had always been to bolster the system of slavery, and in turn they gained some sense of power from their status as superior to enslaved people. This was especially true for women in slaveholding families, however small, because they enjoyed at least some potential to relieve themselves of work they viewed as too strenuous or degrading. In her classic work, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggested that the plantation mistress occupied a position in a household that was the very embodiment of capitalism, relying as it did on the commercial staple crop, while the women themselves lived out a social existence not deeply touched by market relations. Their world was far from as public as their northern counterparts, due to the slaveholding South’s particular system of paternalism; on balance the market seemed to have a neutral effect on white women’s status. Joan Cashin, however, painted a bleak picture of women in wealthy white families who moved to the cotton frontier. They were used to relying on the utility of kinship ties to double as economic networks plugging them into capital and exchange. Their relocation to the cotton frontier, at their husbands’ behest, disrupted sustained kinship contact, reducing planter women’s access to economic autonomy. Both angles can be contrasted with Stephanie Jones-Rogers’ recent work in which white women are shown to be shrewd participants in the commercial economy as capitalistic slaveholders (McCurry 1997 ; Fox-Genovese 1988; Cashin 1991; Burke 2010; Jones-Rogers 2019).
In the course of investigating economic mobility in the intensifying agricultural market, scholars used to discuss an “agricultural ladder”—an economic scale of free white farmers at the top of which sat landowners, then tenants, and finally landless farm laborers. Scholars debated the extent to which America’s farmers could ascend the rungs—for example, if a tenant farmer could easily rise to the rank of yeoman or if, as in Paul W. Gates’ reckoning, farmers faced bleaker prospects. An essential aspect of the question has always involved access to land. Only acquisition of acreage could transform a farm laborer into a yeoman. How much opportunity did Americans have to achieve this? By 1860, in the northeast, not even 2/5 of heads of households fell into the category of owners or renters of farmland. Northerners and southerners alike often affixed their hoped for land ownership on points west. Some tried squatting, banking on access to preemption claims. Speculators, who often clashed with squatters, bought up the majority of military land grants. Richard Nation found some persistence in Washington County, southern Indiana, where by 1840, 36 percent of people who had purchased land in the county in the 31 years previous still resided there. In antebellum Appalachia, 40 percent of free households did not farm land under their control and only 10 percent of farmers could be called “subsistence” farmers. Many endured life as tenants, laborers, or slaves of the farmers who did own land (Ellis 1944; Gates 1960; Bode and Ginter 1987; Atack 1989; Kulikoff 1992; Dunaway 1996; Nation 2005).
Indeed, landowners who expanded their market activity often did so by exploiting landless and enslaved labor. In fact, scholars understand that it was the ready labor pool that helped make much of the increased northern production of the 1850s possible. Many farmers engaged in new pursuits that required more labor than their previous crop cultures, such as tobacco in Massachusetts. Traditionally, when farmers hired labor they did so intermittently and for the short term. Increasingly, however, farm workers signed contracts to labor for the whole spring and summer. The new economy placed some farm laborers in the predicament where they came to rely on such contracts to make ends meet (Clark 1990; Dunaway 1996).
Historians have well documented economic inequality in the antebellum South. While the South was incredibly prosperous as a region—indeed the lower Mississippi Valley was one of the richest places in the country—success was not uniformly enjoyed. Poor farmers were unlikely to become landowners. Charles C. Bolton found that landless whites made up 30–50 percent of the white population, most of whom were farm laborers and tenants. Landless southerners were likely to remain so due to a tight credit market. Landowners frequently paid farm workers for their labor in kind rather than cash wages. Those who sought to achieve landownership via preemption risked being foiled by speculators. Only 10 percent of the persistent residents of Northeast Mississippi from 1850 to 1860 had acquired land. Texas also became concentrated into the hands of larger farmers, especially slaveholders. Not only did the planters hold the most property there but their share of it steadily increased. Slaveholders in Richard Lowe and Randolph Campbell’s classic study of antebellum Texans made up only 1/3 of farmers but owned 2/3 of the real property. They produced most of the region’s cotton. When it comes to the middle group of farmers, which included both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaveholders had the edge in property and production. Yeomen prospered, but the nonslaveholders among them did not realize the same gains. In Madison County, Tennessee, slaveholders increased their already disproportionate share of land from 1850 to 1860; the wealthiest 10 percent of landowners there owned 60 percent of real estate in 1850, increasing that hold to 68 percent by 1860. Thirty-five percent of families in the county owned no land in 1850, a proportion that rose to 40 percent by 1860 (Lowe and Campbell 1987; Bolton 1994; Edwards 1999; Johnson 2013).
It is clear that questions of access, upward mobility, and relative gain or loss in antebellum agriculture cannot be disentangled from slavery. The scholarship on that relationship is rich and much of it focuses on the South’s failure to diversify its economy. Gavin Wright’s preference for framing slavery not as labor relationship but as a set of property rights in labor helps illuminate the problem. Owning captive labor (rather than relying on a pool of free, mobile workers) allowed slaveholders complete control to allocate labor as they saw fit or even pick up and apply that labor in a new region. This only encouraged slaveholders to keep putting money back into expanding their captive labor force. Their major investment, therefore, was not into their community; precious little of the money they spent found its way into other parts of economy. Economic straits, as so many scholars have shown, related to the South’s lack of diversification in industry, because so much wealth was held in enslaved people as property. Their intensification of a staple crop did not alone explain it. While historians, as we have discussed, have investigated the toll this system took on “plain folk,” Keri Leigh Merritt’s recent work reflects a renewed emphasis on how detrimental slavery was to poor white southerners. Merritt argued that slavery was designed not only to exploit African American labor but to subdue poor whites as well. As a result of the economic patterns of planters, the mass of whites suffered not only from inequality and a lack of mobility, but a consistent depressed state. Slavery harmed so many poor whites so seriously, in Merritt’s reckoning, that its end represented a “double emancipation.” Clearly, however, only one group, African Americans, truly needed emancipation from chattel slavery. As historians came to focus more intently on their plight, the utility of applying earlier models like the old “agricultural ladder” fall short. Enslaved people suffered most from the expansion of the commercial agriculture in the South (Brown 1976; Wright 2003; Merritt 2017).
While the historiography of American slavery has exploded since the 1960s into a constellation of studies exploring themes like culture, religion, family, and resistance, the last 20 years or so of scholarship have vastly improved its reckoning with enslaved people as farmers. Bondspeople lived close to the land, albeit in a coerced intimacy. In many ways, enslaved people were the experts. They held and passed down a deep knowledge of the land and crops. In fact, it was often enslaved farmers who actually tested new methods, crop varieties, and technology. The landscape of production heavily influenced enslaved people’s concept of their neighborhoods. The system treated their bodies as commodities. Nearly everything enslaved farmers did held implications for production. Even bondspeople’s social worlds affected and were affected by the crop routine. They made the most of it in order to carve out breathing room despite the brutality of the system. For example, scholars like Daina Ramey Berry have identified the practice of “working socials,” which brought enslaved farmers together as they completed tasks like corn shucking. In these ways, bonded farmers overlay their own meaning onto the
